VMware vSphere 5.x includes automated server workload balancing in the vSphere Enterprise and Enterprise+ premium suites via two feature sets: Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) and Distributed Power Management (DPM). DRS and DPM together are intended to provide an automated method for balancing compute capacity and reducing energy consumption in a highly virtualized datacenter.

These capabilities are important to ensure that an organization is efficiently leveraging virtualization host capacity in a manner that provides greatest performance benefits while reducing ongoing operating costs. However, research has shown that 65% to 70% of organizations are running more than one hypervisor. As a result, it’s necessary to provide these capabilities universally on every hypervisor platform in use – not on just the most expensive editions of a single hypervisor.

In this article, we’ll briefly describe each of these key technical areas and contrast with how these same capabilities are delivered in Windows Server 2012, our FREE Hyper-V Server 2012 enterprise-grade bare-metal hypervisor, and System Center 2012 SP1 Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) across multiple hypervisors in a heterogeneous Private Cloud ...

At a recent community event, I met “Scott”, a savvy IT Pro who was in the process of planning the architecture for a new datacenter location at his company. Scott is an experienced datacenter engineer who manages several other virtualized datacenters. Although he is currently running VMware for the hypervisor platform in his existing datacenters, he was intrigued by Windows Server 2012 and the free Hyper-V Server 2012 enterprise-grade bare-metal hypervisor, primarily because he had been hearing good things about Hyper-V from peers who had been evaluating Microsoft Private Cloud in their organizations.

So, Scott decided to go on a “shopping trip” to explore what would be involved with implementing the Private Cloud solution he was looking for in his next datacenter. What Scott found really surprised him in terms of capabilities and dramatic cost differences when leveraging Microsoft Private Cloud vs the related VMware offerings. Read on to learn about Scott’s findings … you may be shocked too!

This article provides a summary of Scott’s interesting journey and reports on his findings from his research on implementing Private Clouds using Microsoft Private Cloud vs VMware vSphere, vCenter and vCloud offerings ...

FREE EBOOK: Get started as an "Early Expert" on Windows Server 2012 R2!

Windows Server 2012 R2 is the next major release of Windows Server … and it’s almost HERE! As announced on Brad Anderson’s In The Cloud blog, this new R2 release has already been released to manufacturing (RTM) for our OEM partners and will be generally available in just a few short weeks on October 18th.

In this article, I provide a brief introduction to some of the new capabilities that I’m most excited about, along with the steps that you can use to download a new eBook for FREE: Introducing Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview Release.

Step-by-Step: Get up to $200 in FREE Cloud Services for Building Your Lab!

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Keith Mayer is a Technical Evangelist at Microsoft focused on Windows Infrastructure, Data Center Virtualization, Systems Management and Private Cloud. Keith has over 17 years of experience as a technical leader of complex IT projects, in diverse roles, such as Network Engineer, IT Manager, Technical Instructor and Consultant. He has consulted and trained thousands of IT professionals worldwide on the design and implementation of enterprise technology solutions.

Keith is currently certified on several Microsoft technologies, including Private Cloud, System Center, Hyper-V, Windows, Windows Server, SharePoint and Exchange. He also holds other industry certifications from IBM, Cisco, Citrix, HP, CheckPoint, CompTIA and Interwoven.